Contemporary Catholic Political Philosophy

Contemporary Catholic Political Philosophy: A History of Catholic Political Philosophy: Volume III considers two distinct strands of Catholic political thought arising in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that were made especially urgent by two extra-philosophical factors: the forced retreat of papal authority from the temporal sphere and the rising tide of political ideologies. One strand is the formulation of Catholic social thought by the papal magisterium, which was not meant to become a philosophy; rather, it was meant to provide parameters within which Catholic political philosophy should develop. Nevertheless, as papal encyclicals added more and more detail to Catholic social thought, it often became an authoritative substitute for Catholic political philosophy. The protagonists of the other strand were laymen or priests outside the papal magisterium, and they represent various ways of conceiving Church-state relations and economic issues in light of the growth of the nation-state. Jacques Maritain, Yves Simone, John Courtney Murray, all represent attempts to weave together elements of classical political philosophy, especially the Thomistic, with different directions in twentieth century philosophy, for example, Personalism. Economic solutions to political problems, on the other hand, cleaved Catholic thinkers between the twin alternatives of Marxism and Capitalism. Gustavo Gutierrez and Leonardo Boff (who also offers a view of Marxist social justice as inseparable from ecology) speak on behalf of the former, while Michael Novak is a proponent of the latter. Theirs is a dialectical relation to modernity, transforming not only their philosophical sources but the direction of Catholic reflection on political matters as well. Crucially, all these thinkers attempt to redeem various philosophical trends emergent in the twentieth century by assimilating them to Catholic thought. The assimilation of these philosophical trends with Catholicism resulted in new and divergent Catholic political philosophies.